Holocaust Denial

[Cochise]

In fairness, I should put forward the other point of view which I have heard from actual nurses, albeit getting on for half a century ago. Which is that some babies are born with such severe abnormalities that no attempt is made to revive them.

The moral maze is a difficult thing. And judgement calls will always have an error factor.

 

[dejanmikic]

The only possible denial for me would be in 3-4 centuries from now, superb beings on Earth would think about it and shake their heads.."...wtf? surely not possible..."

 

[Little_grey_lady]

It's important to distinguish between Holocaust Deniers and historians who are not denying the Holocaust but trying to get all the details right. I find it disappointing that it is so often presented as if only Jews were the victims, when many other people 'undesirable' to the Nazi state were pumped into the same system of industrial genocide. Gypsies and homosexuals, for example. (How the heck did Goering, above all, live with himself?)
.

I agree completely - I had this argument with a few facebook posts in January on holocaust memorial day. They all said something like Remembering the 6 million jews and other people who died. I see it written in so many newspaper articles and historical documents. To me, saying 6 million is almost lessening the effect, and can also lead to people then wanting to question how many people actually died, because they see two different figures. I asked someone to change their post from 6 to 12 million and they refused saying they had already made it clear it was Jews and other people. I'm not at all taking away from the fact that 6 million jews died, but to me, not quoting the full figure and acknowledging the other 6 million is washing them out of history.

 

[Victory]

I agree completely - I had this argument with a few facebook posts in January on holocaust memorial day. They all said something like Remembering the 6 million jews and other people who died. I see it written in so many newspaper articles and historical documents. To me, saying 6 million is almost lessening the effect, and can also lead to people then wanting to question how many people actually died, because they see two different figures. I asked someone to change their post from 6 to 12 million and they refused saying they had already made it clear it was Jews and other people. I'm not at all taking away from the fact that 6 million jews died, but to me, not quoting the full figure and acknowledging the other 6 million is washing them out of history.

To offer a different perspective from both of your's:

As a Jew who had large amounts of his family on both my father and mother's side murdered in the Holocaust, we regard the Shoah (as it is called in Hebrew) as different.
It was the sole attempt in History where someone wanted to wipe out all Jews in existence.
There have been other examples of mass murder against Jews, many pogroms, but this was different.

There have been for some years a Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, and another two days in our religious lunar calendar when we remember the dead of the Holocaust.
But the international calendar/community in 1996 subsequently added this Holocaust Memorial Day of 27 January.
For all victims of the Nazi violence.

This act of remembrance includes the many millions of others people of other faiths/beliefs who were murdered by the Nazis.
They are not less important than Jews, not less worthy or anything like that, and they are very much remembered by us and others and written about in numerous plays, films, books etc.

It also includes the many millions who have been murdered in mass slaughter since...Cambodia and Rwanda are the examples which I most readily think of.

Now here comes the controversial point.

By you writing on Facebook "But what about the others millions?" it actually reads to me, as denigrating and virtue signalling, as possibly anti-Semitic.
You clearly do not realise this, and having had numerous interacting with @Cochise on here I have no belief at all that he is anti Semitic. (And I have no reason to suppose you are either.)
But for a non-Jew to tell a Jew how to relate to Holocaust Memorial Day, will not be well received by us.
We are remembering our families, we are all too aware of what happened under the Nazis.

On a practical level, we have in the UK alone more than one charity from our community and working with other communities, which spend all year educating the entire population on the dangers of extremist hate against people, of and by all religions.

 

[Cochise]

To offer a different perspective from both of your's:

As a Jew who had large amounts of his family on both my father and mother's side murdered in the Holocaust, we regard the Shoah (as it is called in Hebrew) as different.
It was the sole attempt in History where someone wanted to wipe out all Jews in existence.
There have been other examples of mass murder against Jews, many pogroms, but this was different.

There have been for some years a Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, and another two days in our religious lunar calendar when we remember the dead of the Holocaust.
But the international calendar/community in 1996 subsequently added this Holocaust Memorial Day of 27 January.
For all victims of the Nazi violence.

This act of remembrance includes the many millions of others people of other faiths/beliefs who were murdered by the Nazis.
They are not less important than Jews, not less worthy or anything like that, and they are very much remembered by us and others and written about in numerous plays, films, books etc.

It also includes the many millions who have been murdered in mass slaughter since...Cambodia and Rwanda are the examples which I most readily think of.

Now here comes the controversial point.

By you writing on Facebook "But what about the others millions?" it actually reads to me, as denigrating and virtue signalling, as possibly anti-Semitic.
You clearly do not realise this, and having had numerous interacting with @Cochise on here I have no belief at all that he is anti Semitic. (And I have no reason to suppose you are either.)
But for a non-Jew to tell a Jew how to relate to Holocaust Memorial Day, will not be well received by us.
We are remembering our families, we are all too aware of what happened under the Nazis.

On a practical level, we have in the UK alone more than one charity from our community and working with other communities, which spend all year educating the entire population on the dangers of extremist hate against people, of and by all religions.

I appreciate your comments. It's a difficult thing especially in this period where antisemitism appears to be on the rise again, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum.

 

[PeteS]

Gives a whole new angle on 'bed-blocking' that's for sure. the trouble is, I wonder how long it occurs to some darn bureaucratic today as being a good idea. Of course they'd dress it up more subtly. Well, maybe.

Actually, would we even know? Thinking about some recent NHS scandals -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_Care_Pathway_for_the_Dying_Patient

That obviously was 'sold' to the medical staff as a good thing to do, and they mostly obeyed orders. Still do, maybe.

I hate the human race sometimes. Quite a lot of the time, in fact. except of course for us lot.

I shudder and grieve horrendously at the very mention of the Liverpool Care Pathway.

 

[AnonyJ]

In fairness, I should put forward the other point of view which I have heard from actual nurses, albeit getting on for half a century ago. Which is that some babies are born with such severe abnormalities that no attempt is made to revive them.

The moral maze is a difficult thing. And judgement calls will always have an error factor.

Not to take this thread off on a tangent but the above situation is where (usually) medical ethics committees come in - a dull but absolutely essential part of healthcare. They have developed ethical clinical responses, and will also meet in emergency situations.

In this situation parents are normally aware they will be having a child with traumatic disabilities (due to ultrasound and other tests) and are counselled beforehand, with their wishes normally being paramount. Some parents decide DNR before or around birth if the condition is incompatible with life. If the child is born living but expected to die very soon then babies are fed, hydrated and an effort is made to create some pain-free time for family to say goodbye.

The difference between well-meant, ethical treatments (or withdrawal of them) with the general consensus and agreement of parents and family and the horror of Aktion t4 is the existence of medical ethics at all, and the willingness to adapt and change them to new medical realities. For example, the LCP no longer exists as such.

The Aktion t4 doctors in Nazi Germany had turned their back on humanity and the Hippocratic oath in service to an ideology.

Radio 4 has a series named 'Inside The Ethics Committee' which examines a different medical case (anonymised) each edition, fascinating listening if you're interested in the field of medical ethics. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007xbtd

 

[Cochise]

Not to take this thread off on a tangent but the above situation is where (usually) medical ethics committees come in - a dull but absolutely essential part of healthcare. They have developed ethical clinical responses, and will also meet in emergency situations.

In this situation parents are normally aware they will be having a child with traumatic disabilities (due to ultrasound and other tests) and are counselled beforehand, with their wishes normally being paramount. Some parents decide DNR before or around birth if the condition is incompatible with life. If the child is born living but expected to die very soon then babies are fed, hydrated and an effort is made to create some pain-free time for family to say goodbye.

The difference between well-meant, ethical treatments (or withdrawal of them) with the general consensus and agreement of parents and family and the horror of Aktion t4 is the existence of medical ethics at all, and the willingness to adapt and change them to new medical realities. For example, the LCP no longer exists as such.

The Aktion t4 doctors in Nazi Germany had turned their back on humanity and the Hippocratic oath in service to an ideology.

Radio 4 has a series named 'Inside The Ethics Committee' which examines a different medical case (anonymised) each edition, fascinating listening if you're interested in the field of medical ethics. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007xbtd

I was talking about many years ago where modern techniques were unavailable and a drastically deformed baby could still be a surprise. The nurses I knew were very caring people who felt that it was unfair to impose a very seriously deformed child on the parents.

Now of course the situation would be different...

But do we then embark on the very cloudy waters of Eugenics?

I don't profess to have answers to many of the questions I raise, just my own suspicion of inconsistency in some of the easily adopted sloganism of current morality.

 

[AnonyJ]

I was talking about many years ago where modern techniques were unavailable and a drastically deformed baby could still be a surprise. The nurses I knew were very caring people who felt that it was unfair to impose a very seriously deformed child on the parents.

Now of course the situation would be different...

But do we then embark on the very cloudy waters of Eugenics?

I don't profess to have answers to many of the questions I raise, just my own suspicion of inconsistency in some of the easily adopted sloganism of current morality.

I agree wholeheartedly with your post above

I think the decisions made back then were the progenitors of the ethics committees/boards, these and the general enlightenment of NHS staff from the 1970s onwards has been positive. DNR decisions are not usually the same as active killings for economic/ideological reasons, the former is often a true mercy.

But I think we are guilty of derailing the thread with our observations, back to denial of holocaust; If I'm not correct in reading the thread title as meaning denial of genocidal events (holocausts) as opposed to the Shoah Holocaust then I apologise for including this:

I recently did some reading around the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, and it is absolutely astounding to read the denials issued by intellectual western left-leaning public figures (Noam Chomsky et al) even as accounts and information were being increasingly gathered by respected sources.

The hindsight educated opinion seems to be that they wanted so much to believe that a communitarian Leninist-Marxist state could prosper that they would not accept the atrocities until they literally saw them in photographs or film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial

 

[kiln_wood]

The hindsight educated opinion seems to be that they wanted so much to believe that a communitarian Leninist-Marxist state could prosper that they would not accept the atrocities until they literally saw them in photographs or film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial

Quite possibly why one doesn't hear much about the number of people who died at the hands of the state in the USSR, before and after WWII (estimates are 30-50 million).

 

[Little_grey_lady]

To offer a different perspective from both of your's:

As a Jew who had large amounts of his family on both my father and mother's side murdered in the Holocaust, we regard the Shoah (as it is called in Hebrew) as different.
It was the sole attempt in History where someone wanted to wipe out all Jews in existence.
There have been other examples of mass murder against Jews, many pogroms, but this was different.

There have been for some years a Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel, and another two days in our religious lunar calendar when we remember the dead of the Holocaust.
But the international calendar/community in 1996 subsequently added this Holocaust Memorial Day of 27 January.
For all victims of the Nazi violence.

This act of remembrance includes the many millions of others people of other faiths/beliefs who were murdered by the Nazis.
They are not less important than Jews, not less worthy or anything like that, and they are very much remembered by us and others and written about in numerous plays, films, books etc.

It also includes the many millions who have been murdered in mass slaughter since...Cambodia and Rwanda are the examples which I most readily think of.

Now here comes the controversial point.

By you writing on Facebook "But what about the others millions?" it actually reads to me, as denigrating and virtue signalling, as possibly anti-Semitic.
You clearly do not realise this, and having had numerous interacting with @Cochise on here I have no belief at all that he is anti Semitic. (And I have no reason to suppose you are either.)
But for a non-Jew to tell a Jew how to relate to Holocaust Memorial Day, will not be well received by us.
We are remembering our families, we are all too aware of what happened under the Nazis.

Victory, many thanks for your post and for taking the time to explain your point of view. I'm always willing to learn something from another perspective, and am more than willing to take on board how my actions/words could be misunderstood. In fact now I feel quite embarrassed that anyone may have seen my actions in anything other than the light I intended them in.

I hope that my post was not offensive to you, and I certainly did not intend to be anti Semitic in anyway. I will be sure to be more sensitive around the topic in future,. Once again, thank you for helping to educate me in a thoughtful way.

 

[Victory]

@Little_grey_lady

I was not offended nor did I think you were being anti-Semitic.
Was just offering the perspective from another angle.

And thanks @Cochise too.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

I remember when the National Curriculum came in - just as I was starting to teach - I was a student in one school where the guy whose class I was in, doing Teaching Practice, continued teaching his Year 6 kids about Kristallnacht - even though it was no longer in the curriculum for those kids. I found that so impressive, that I continued, when I qualified, to sometimes veer off the NC and just give the kids the benefit of something far more important to know, and sod the bosses and the politicians. Not virtue signalling just how I felt. Often did a fair bit on the Windrush era, as well, later when I taught in areas which had a good bit of diversity - and didn't shy away from showing my kids photos of the offensive, racist signs people letting out properties put in their windows but then we were trained to take things head on.

History is my passion and the way it is mangled and taught - well, the way governments compel it to be taught - distorts it far too much for my liking with racism and imperialism neatly hidden from view.

I feel pretty confused about my dad being there in Palestine, in 1947. I have the photos but am not sure what to think about it. If he'd been killed that day, I wouldn't be here! I'm fairly sure he told me he shouldn't have taken photos and it isn't the sort of thing you'll find in any history book. He wrote a really dry piece on the BBC People's War page but I can't find it anymore.

 

[Cochise]

I remember when the National Curriculum came in - just as I was starting to teach - I was a student in one school where the guy whose class I was in, doing Teaching Practice, continued teaching his Year 6 kids about Kristallnacht - even though it was no longer in the curriculum for those kids. I found that so impressive, that I continued, when I qualified, to sometimes veer off the NC and just give the kids the benefit of something far more important to know, and sod the bosses and the politicians. Not virtue signalling just how I felt. Often did a fair bit on the Windrush era, as well, later when I taught in areas which had a good bit of diversity - and didn't shy away from showing my kids photos of the offensive, racist signs people letting out properties put in their windows but then we were trained to take things head on.

History is my passion and the way it is mangled and taught - well, the way governments compel it to be taught - distorts it far too much for my liking with racism and imperialism neatly hidden from view.

I feel pretty confused about my dad being there in Palestine, in 1947. I have the photos but am not sure what to think about it. If he'd been killed that day, I wouldn't be here! I'm fairly sure he told me he shouldn't have taken photos and it isn't the sort of thing you'll find in any history book. He wrote a really dry piece on the BBC People's War page but I can't find it anymore.

My father-in-law was in Palestine at the same time and copped a nasty leg injury. I don't think he had any idea what he was doing there or why he was there at all.

 

[INT21]

My father-in-law was in Palestine at the same time and copped a nasty leg injury. I don't think he had any idea what he was doing there or why he was there at all.

I think today it would be seen as 'ethnic cleansing'.

 

[Xanatic*]

He probably mixed it up with Pakistan, I do it all the time.

 

[INT21]

He probably mixed it up with Pakistan, I do it all the time.

I think he would have noticed the difference.

 

[AnonyJ]

I remember when the National Curriculum came in - just as I was starting to teach - I was a student in one school where the guy whose class I was in, doing Teaching Practice, continued teaching his Year 6 kids about Kristallnacht - even though it was no longer in the curriculum for those kids. I found that so impressive, that I continued, when I qualified, to sometimes veer off the NC and just give the kids the benefit of something far more important to know, and sod the bosses and the politicians. Not virtue signalling just how I felt. Often did a fair bit on the Windrush era, as well, later when I taught in areas which had a good bit of diversity - and didn't shy away from showing my kids photos of the offensive, racist signs people letting out properties put in their windows but then we were trained to take things head on.

History is my passion and the way it is mangled and taught - well, the way governments compel it to be taught - distorts it far too much for my liking with racism and imperialism neatly hidden from view.

I feel pretty confused about my dad being there in Palestine, in 1947. I have the photos but am not sure what to think about it. If he'd been killed that day, I wouldn't be here! I'm fairly sure he told me he shouldn't have taken photos and it isn't the sort of thing you'll find in any history book. He wrote a really dry piece on the BBC People's War page but I can't find it anymore.

Thank you

 

[Frideswide]

The hindsight educated opinion seems to be that they wanted so much to believe that a communitarian Leninist-Marxist state could prosper that they would not accept the atrocities until they literally saw them in photographs or film

This. Alas.

My parents were rabid fundementalists about everything - their atheism as well as their (to current views) extreme left wing views. To the extent that they regarded Khrushchev as a traitor and liar; a western stooge spreading misinformation.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

My father-in-law was in Palestine at the same time and copped a nasty leg injury. I don't think he had any idea what he was doing there or why he was there at all.

My dad didn't question it much, either, or not aloud, or to us. As a kid I was just quite proud he'd worn the red beret and been a soldier in the War but as I got older, and realised where he was and what he was doing - and also that he was in plenty of life threatening situations one way or another but the only action he was involved in - he was being shot at by Israelis. And I think a lot of folk don't even understand that was the threat to some Allied soldiers, after the troops in Europe had been demobbed and were safely home. My grandad, meanwhile, finished his war in 1945 and was involved in countless actions in Europe, throughout - he saw more actual fighting, than my dad, when he was still only 16 and ran away to fight in WW1, let alone surviving the whole of WW2 - anti-aircraft so in some fairly busy places. My dad's only action - nearly being killed by Israelis. I think it might have been airbrushed out of history and for reasons I kind of understand, and yet.

Only thing he ever said to me at all about it - apart from showing me the photos he took of the aftermath - was when he said "They thought we weren't setting up Israel fast enough". This is not my period of interest in history and I don't know anything about it, to know whether that was the case, or not. He knew that 2 years earlier, his father had walked into Belsen. I'd love to know what conversations they had. But I suspect they had none.

ETA: He was a decent man with fairly liberal values. I never spoke to him about what happened to the Palestinians subsequently and to this day and he'll have known, from my politics, what I thought of it, without asking me. I wish I'd had that conversation with him, now he's long gone. I know the photos of the deck of that ship he took, he wasn't supposed to take.

On a more Fortean note - I have some photos he took a couple of years, I guess, earlier, in either India or Pakistan. He photographed a mystic and the Indian Rope Trick. That was the thing I kept looking at, in his wartime photo album - moreso than I looked at the later stuff. In fact, I didn't notice the soldiers' body parts littered on the floor in the Palestine photos until looking at them again as an adult. Have no idea why he whipped his camera out when no-one was looking to document that. But he did.

 

[Yithian]

My dad didn't question it much, either, or not aloud, or to us. As a kid I was just quite proud he'd worn the red beret and been a soldier in the War but as I got older, and realised where he was and what he was doing - and also that he was in plenty of life threatening situations one way or another but the only action he was involved in - he was being shot at by Israelis. And I think a lot of folk don't even understand that was the threat to some Allied soldiers, after the troops in Europe had been demobbed and were safely home. My grandad, meanwhile, finished his war in 1945 and was involved in countless actions in Europe, throughout - he saw more actual fighting, than my dad, when he was still only 16 and ran away to fight in WW1, let alone surviving the whole of WW2 - anti-aircraft so in some fairly busy places. My dad's only action - nearly being killed by Israelis. I think it might have been airbrushed out of history and for reasons I kind of understand, and yet.

Only thing he ever said to me at all about it - apart from showing me the photos he took of the aftermath - was when he said "They thought we weren't setting up Israel fast enough". This is not my period of interest in history and I don't know anything about it, to know whether that was the case, or not. He knew that 2 years earlier, his father had walked into Belsen. I'd love to know what conversations they had. But I suspect they had none.

ETA: He was a decent man with fairly liberal values. I never spoke to him about what happened to the Palestinians subsequently and to this day and he'll have known, from my politics, what I thought of it, without asking me. I wish I'd had that conversation with him, now he's long gone. I know the photos of the deck of that ship he took, he wasn't supposed to take.

On a more Fortean note - I have some photos he took a couple of years, I guess, earlier, in either India or Pakistan. He photographed a mystic and the Indian Rope Trick. That was the thing I kept looking at, in his wartime photo album - moreso than I looked at the later stuff. In fact, I didn't notice the soldiers' body parts littered on the floor in the Palestine photos until looking at them again as an adult. Have no idea why he whipped his camera out when no-one was looking to document that. But he did.

A really interesting read, thank you.

Puzzlingly, late- and post-colonial entanglements are some of the most heavily trodden ground for modern historians, both political and military, but the general public seems to have very little conception about where British troops were and what they were doing.

The fact that the names of many of the places have since changed also muddies the waters for the incurious.

Despite caricatures of the British performing a series of 'undignified scuttles', as partition in India has been portrayed by some, the truth is that British forces were mostly trying to prevent opposing races and ideologies from slaughtering one another and targeting more neutral civilian populations. I shan't get into the details of every case, but while it's true there was some heavy-handedness (and a few actual atrocities), the objective in most cases was not to stomp on the fingers of freedom fighters seeking to throw off the shackles of colonialism, but to maintain functioning states that could be handed over--still functioning--to whichever faction was least likely to a) turn communist, b) turn on its populace.

Yes, there was a fair degree of self-interest in play: we wanted customers, trading partners and allies against Red China and the U.S.S.R., and the post-war economic rebalancing didn't stretch to Imperial policing that had come to cost more than it brought home, but, at the same time, politicians and civil servants genuinely viewed themselves as having a moral responsibility not to vanish in the night, leaving a new nation on the verge of collapse.

It's often hard for the modern British, who have enjoyed a relatively stable history with comparatively few instances of actual social collapse, to imagine that total societal collapse is a real possibility: a collapse in which the dead will pile up in the streets while the electricity goes off, the water dries up, the national reserves vanish from the vault, and the food becomes so expensive that many can't eat. At worse, you get 1947 in which between one and two million died and tens of millions were displaced, bequeathing the whole subcontinent a murderous legacy that still poisons their politics.

My personal view is that in Palestine, as in Greece, India, Malaya and Cyprus (to take the clearest examples), we were dealing (not exclusively) with terrorists who were willing to kill not just their enemies but also innocent civilians to achieve ideological goals.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

A really interesting read, thank you.

Puzzlingly, late- and post-colonial entanglements are some of the most heavily trodden ground for modern historians, both political and military, but the general public seems to have very little conception about where British troops were and what they were doing.

The fact that the names of many of the places have since changed also muddies the waters for the incurious.

Despite caricatures of the British performing a series of 'undignified scuttles', as partition in India has been portrayed by some, the truth is that British forces were mostly trying to prevent opposing races and ideologies from slaughtering one another and targeting more neutral civilian populations. I shan't get into the details of every case, but while it's true there was some heavy-handedness (and a few actual atrocities), the objective in most cases was not to stomp on the fingers of freedom fighters seeking to throw off the shackles of colonialism, but to maintain functioning states that could be handed over--still functioning--to whichever faction was least likely to a) turn communist, b) turn on its populace.

Yes, there was a fair degree of self-interest in play: we wanted customers, trading partners and allies against Red China and the U.S.S.R., and the post-war economic rebalancing didn't stretch to Imperial policing that had come to cost more than it brought home, but, at the same time, politicians and civil servants genuinely viewed themselves as having a moral responsibility not to vanish in the night, leaving a new nation on the verge of collapse.

It's often hard for the modern British, who have enjoyed a relatively stable history with comparatively few instances of actual social collapse, to imagine that total societal collapse is a real possibility: a collapse in which the dead will pile up in the streets while the electricity goes off, the water dries up, the national reserves vanish from the vault, and the food becomes so expensive that many can't eat. At worse, you get 1947 in which between one and two million died and tens of millions were displaced, bequeathing the whole subcontinent a murderous legacy that still poisons their politics.

My personal view is that in Palestine, as in Greece, India, Malaya and Cyprus (to take the clearest examples), we were dealing (not exclusively) with terrorists who were willing to kill not just their enemies but also innocent civilians to achieve ideological goals.

Yes, am sure he referred to them as 'terrorists'. The old cliche one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter etc etc. I hear you on some things being more complex than plain old colonialism, as well. I remember him saying that as they sailed to India, being taught on the way about various cultures etc and to respect them. He was just a daft 17 year old, I've no idea how seriously he took anything.

Most of his photos are almost touristy - things he saw. Many of them taken on leave as they were too far from home to come home. So it's a lot of motor bike scrambling, swimming, high diving, cricket... as I say, the Indian rope trick, etc... then, incongruous, these images of the deck of a boat (I think) strewn with bits of dead people. Grainy black and white, as you'd expect, so he didn't hide those from us as kids, just I don't think I ever looked closely enough to realise what he'd photographed and it was only decades later he told me that was his bit of fighting. Well, he claimed that as radio operator, he didn't get to actually fight but I was never sure what to believe. Totally airbushed from history as if it never happened. And not many soldiers that day had a camera with them, I'm guessing.

 

[AgProv]

Another story which was quite common through the late 1940s into the 1950s was that the officers at the extermination camps used Jewish babies for skeet-shooting. They'd throw the babies up into the air and blast away at them with rifles, shotguns and pistols.

I learned this gruesome tale in high school in the middle 1950s, but haven't seen it even mentioned in any Holocaust history in the last 45 years (except for books by the Deniers, that is, as they "disprove" the story.) So this SEEMS to be another one of those propaganda stories.
.

This may not have been done in the death camps, but verifiable evidence exists to support assertions that this was an atrocity carried out by the SS troops tasked with recapturing Warsaw after the uprising. Look up Oskar Dirlewanger and the SS unit he raised - it misbehaved so badly even the rest of the SS complained about them.

 

[AgProv]

Ah, an interesting way to spend a Saturday night - find a thread I've never visited before, binge-read it, and pitch in with hopefully useful comments. The Dirlewanger Brigade of the SS had its roots in the "penal regiment" concept, a means for criminals to rehabilitate themselves and gain remission or pardon through military service. Given that Dirlewanger himself was a serial sexual offender with a taste for under-age girls who had in fact done time for sexual crime, it doesn't take genius to see what direction such a military formation would take under his leadership: his rank of Oberfuhrer had no exact equivalent in the regular military, but might have been on a level with a one-star general (USA) or Brigadier (Britain). given the General was a psychopathic sadist and sexual criminal, any pretence of rehabilitation of criminals or of getting some useful service out of them while they were on parole - well, soon forgotten. In the supression of the Warsaw rising, an upper limit for Poles killed by Dirlewanger's men got to around 100,000. Prior to that, he ran a freelance holocaust of his very own in occupied Russia, and one verifable story suggests he experimented with converting Jews into soap to see if the idea could work. Not a nice man. Find a photo of the guy and study his face; it lends credibility to the piece of received folk-wisdom that truly warped and evil people have warped and evil faces. Just sometimes this is easy to believe. It perhaps says something about Nazi Germany that this man, in a normal society, might have ended up dead or incarcerated for life in a place like Broadmoor as a criminal psychopath too dangerous to be allowed to go free. In Nazi Germany, he became a General and had the freedom and the knowing protection of those higher up the ladder to do exactly as he pleased to untermensch.

 

[Yithian]

Yes, am sure he referred to them as 'terrorists'. The old cliche one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter etc etc. I hear you on some things being more complex than plain old colonialism, as well. I remember him saying that as they sailed to India, being taught on the way about various cultures etc and to respect them. He was just a daft 17 year old, I've no idea how seriously he took anything.

Most of his photos are almost touristy - things he saw. Many of them taken on leave as they were too far from home to come home. So it's a lot of motor bike scrambling, swimming, high diving, cricket... as I say, the Indian rope trick, etc... then, incongruous, these images of the deck of a boat (I think) strewn with bits of dead people. Grainy black and white, as you'd expect, so he didn't hide those from us as kids, just I don't think I ever looked closely enough to realise what he'd photographed and it was only decades later he told me that was his bit of fighting. Well, he claimed that as radio operator, he didn't get to actually fight but I was never sure what to believe. Totally airbushed from history as if it never happened. And not many soldiers that day had a camera with them, I'm guessing.

Likewise, my grandfather joined up in 1947 as a seventeen-year-old and did six years all over the show, including a stint in Malaya. He said a bit about it later, and his political perspective is probably where my own one is inherited from, but at the time he was in the British Army, it was his club of his people, and if the British Army was fighting terrorists who were murdering planters and torturing non-sympathetic Malayans, well then he was there to stop that happening regardless of flags or speeches.

As to bodies and photos, of course it looks hideous, but wartime warps a man's perspective. When the enemy has been trying to blow up your vehicle and snipe at you from windows, his dead body--or the dead body of one of his accomplices--becomes the instantiation of a job done and another threat neutralised, not the remains of a man who may have a grieving family and used to have a head full of ideals.

To take an awful example, there was a big scandal in the early-50s with terrorist heads being brought back from the jungle. It looked like the grisliest trophy hunting, but the truth was raw practicality--the kind of raw practicality that only emerges in extremis. Intelligence had demanded watertight identification of anybody killed or captured so that their links and movements could be examined, but the firefight that killed them could have taken place four days' march into a jungle, and carrying a body (or multiple bodies) that far was an exhausting prospect. The Dyak headhunters and Iban Trackers who were in certain areas employed as (very effective) guides and scouts, scoffed at this, hacked off the surest means of identification and tossed it in a sack. Back at camp, the Brits grinned sheepishly and--as you say like virtual schoolboys, posed for photographs before passing it onto special branch. A number of times patrols had been sniped at and men had been wounded or killed, yet the attacker had vanished into the jungle. This left many many were frustrated at their inability to settle the score (many had never fired a shot at the enemy) and the pictures, gruesome in hindsight, were a token of their ability to do just that.

A few months later, one of the photographs was published in the Daily Worker back in Blighty and everybody was squawking about bloodthirsty British boys gone bad. If I recall, the Royal Marine Commandos were those accused in this instance.

The real story, while not really much nicer, is a lot more nuanced than it first seems.

The Mary Hertogh riots were another case where the British Army were criticised for heavy handedness, but in truth they certainly prevented an even greater loss of life:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Hertogh_riots

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

"the British Army were criticised for heavy handedness, but in truth they certainly prevented an even greater loss of life: "

Which reminds me of a claim regularly made on The Guardian's forums that Churchill was a monster because he advocated gassing people. In reality, Churchill argued for the use of tear gas to counter riots, rather than live ammunition.

 

[Cochise]

To my considerable surprise a friend has proved to be a holocaust denier - or I suppose revisionist would be a better term. His claim is that the Germans simply didn't have the capacity or the manpower to kill that many, although he does accept many were killed.

I think his argument is very weak, but of course he's been subject to a twitterstorm of abuse. Wouldn't it be better just to refute his argument? I wonder whether this modern label of 'denier' attached to anyone who questions any part of a narrative is actually helpful if it simply encourages people to hurl abuse rather than point to the facts?

 

[Nosmo King]

To my considerable surprise a friend has proved to be a holocaust denier - or I suppose revisionist would be a better term. His claim is that the Germans simply didn't have the capacity or the manpower to kill that many, although he does accept many were killed.

I think his argument is very weak, but of course he's been subject to a twitterstorm of abuse. Wouldn't it be better just to refute his argument? I wonder whether this modern label of 'denier' attached to anyone who questions any part of a narrative is actually helpful if it simply encourages people to hurl abuse rather than point to the facts?

My question would be, why did your friend feel the need to tell the world, via social media, of his 'revisionist' beliefs?

 

[Cochise]

My question would be, why did your friend feel the need to tell the world, via social media, of his 'revisionist' beliefs?

It came up as a side comment on another topic dealing with the unreliability of figures - data, I mean. When questioned he said why he didn't believe the normally accepted numbers.

Of course the data regarding the actual number of deaths is hard to come by, because the Nazi's went to great lengths in the last months of the war in the East to cover their tracks. But we know at least 5 million Jews died because their names have been discovered - the usual overall total is given as 6 million. Of which somewhere over half died in the actual extermination camps.

6 million could as easily be an underestimate (in my opinion more likely) as an overestimate, but not by millions. There has been 70+ years of detailed research to get as close an estimate as possible.

edit: In his defence I think he simply can't grasp how a totalitarian state can mobilise resources - including of course slave labour - to achieve a goal no matter how monstrous. Like other people - who are much more anti-Semitic than he is - he doesn't grasp that the concentration camps were as much a part of the killing as the extermination camps, and Birkenau was the camp with the highest number of victims precisely because it could use the slave labour from the adjoining Auschwitz.

Believe me I will be having this discussion next time I meet him.

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

Whoopi Goldberg getting into hot water with her comments about the Holocaust.

In response to The Holocaust being the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people, who they deemed to be an inferior race, Goldberg said they [Nazis and Jews] "were two groups of white people".

Following a backlash, she issued an apology.

https://www.theguardian.com/culture...ologises-for-saying-holocaust-isnt-about-race